Now that we have just finished an election where special interest groups seeking to control government through their proxies spent billions of dollars marketing campaigns to make negative claims about competitors, we should think about the lesson this has taught us.
First, most agree that the majority of advertisements, mostly delivered on television, were negative attacks that contained exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies. Also in agreement is that these are not what we want to hear. Now that the election is over, the people who produce them can take their millions paid from big money special interest and crawl back under their rocks. However, we all know they will crawl out again every two years.
So what does this have to do with storage? I hear many of the approaches and tactics sales people use to sell storage products. I cannot help but think many of them are copying the approach used by the political campaigners. Or maybe the political campaigners are copying the storage sales people.
Many storage sales tactics involve pointing out potential shortcomings of competing products. Indeed, many even start out by pointing out that the competition is so bad. Eventually they get around to the product they are pushing, and how it does not have the same problems as the competitor they just bashed. The vendor is expecting the customer to buy a solution because of shortcomings of the competitor, rather than their products’ strengths.
Some competitor bashing is hard to sit through. Much of it is inaccurate, and other parts are speculation about the future or issues that cannot be quantified. So, this maps closely to the political approach of “exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies.” The valuable attributes of the product they are representing are lost in the negative claims about the competition.
Read the full blog post on StorageSoup
You may also be interested in Randy’s blogs on solid state performance metrics and private clouds
